Robin Hanson on the Virtues of Selling Babies
In debates about in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research and organ payments, a trump card often pulled by conservative bioethicsts is that if you pay women for their eggs or organs, it will lead to exploitation of those women, who would then be exploited and “forced” to undergo risky surgery. While intuitively, it seems wrong to pay poor people for their organs/eggs/stem cells, upon further thinking, it’s hard to see how its different than paying poor people to do any demeaning work — or work that others don’t want to do. So while we may feel like we’re being benevolent by prohibiting poor people from selling their bodies, we are probably just limiting their already limited opportunities to participate in the labor force.
This is all a long way of introducing Robin Hanson’s screed on Western adoption from Guatemala;
It is in general a good thing if willing women are induced by money to have babies families want to adopt. Not only do the woman and the family benefit, but the baby gets a life! Positive externalities don’t get much larger than this. We need lower, not higher, barriers to such exchange.
To lower the lawyer’s cut, simplify the law and lower barriers to entry. And why begrudge the mother $3000 when US agencies take a $6000 cut for “paperwork”? How does it help her to limit her options? Do we really have good reasons to think mothers systematically misjudge such options?
On my way to visit Tikal in Guatemala, my tour guide proudly noted how development agencies had helped the local village switch to producing art, rather than the usual exports. It seemed such agencies valued art production well beyond the income it brings. Their priorities, art over bananas over babies, are the opposite of mine.
The alternatives to Western adoption seem to be that Guatemalan women would have the same number of children, because birth rates are high for cultural, economic and developmental factors, but instead would have to raise all of them, meaning that the average Guatemalan child’s welfare is reduced in two ways. One, there are more children for the woman to raise, meaning that their average attention and resources devoted to them would be reduced. This effect is compounded by the fact that, ideally, women would receive payments, meaning they could invest more in their remaining children.
This is speculative, but large scale rich-country adoption of developing nation children could in fact accelerate them through the demographic transition. The demographic transition model holds that in pre-industrialized socities, both birth and death rates are high meaning population growth is very low. In industrialization, death rates crash due to medical and economic advances, but birth rates remain high and come down much slower. During this period, population growth is massive. The third stage of the transition is when birth rates — often due to increased economic and educational independence and opportunities for women — fall to very low levels, and population growth again slows down.
If large scale adoption were to occur, developing countries with high birth rate to death rate ratios would initially still have high fertility, but the effective fertility would drop and women could raise fewer children with more money. As that happens, women would have an independent source of income, meaning they could pursue other educational and economic opportunities, which would then lead to a decrease in total fertility. Sure, it may not be an ideal way to generate income for women in the developing world, but it’s not like there are a whole lot better ideas out there.
